There are a significant number of store PC terminals and Point Of Sale (POS) printers installed today. New features of currently available printers, such as those from Axiohm Transaction Solutions, Inc. (“Axiohm”) of Ithaca, N.Y., have made it possible to invoke color and graphics functions to enhance the appearance of receipts. Such functionality of course requires some way to issue the new commands for invoking the color and graphics functions. But in calculating a return on total investment for such enhancements, marketplace reality often dictates doing without such functionality.
In finding a cost effective way to achieve enhanced receipts, there are both mandatory fixed costs and optional costs. The mandatory costs include replacing a POS printer with a new one that features color and graphics functions. Ignoring for the moment the installation and configuration fixed costs which go along with the purchase price, an application upgrade necessary to use the new features is usually a prohibitive expense. Changing out the application, or getting custom modifications done, is the major factor that prevents the enhancement proposition from being viable. But if a solution that can coexist with an unchanged “legacy” retail application were possible, then optional costs would be minimized and the new functionality would become viable. Desired solutions would also allow offsetting these costs by targeting the new printing effects for marketing and advertising purposes.
The principal choice in fixed costs is which printer to purchase. There are at least some candidates, as Axiohm POS printers have offered several graphics commands that can also be set as configuration options. These graphics remain intact across printer power cycles, indicating that they are stored in non-volatile memory. These configurable graphics features can be downloaded and saved prior to installation. If the desired graphic effects are of a static nature, then all that is needed for implementation is a one-time configuration of these graphics at installation time. Very infrequent changes may also be adequately served in such printers by periodically performing off-line reconfiguration and graphics down-loads of different logos into non-volatile memory.
On the other hand, if in addition to the static graphics, which are quite similar to pre-printed receipt paper, the ability to change the appearance of certain items on each receipt is also desired, then new functionality is required. What is needed in the industry is a method that can use the repetitive format of POS receipts and somehow tie selected data to desired effects which uses the new color and graphics capabilities of the printer. The desired outcome is to bridge the visual gap between a legacy receipt and the appearance of a new receipt produced by an application making full use of the graphics command set of POS printers. But in this case, the application producing the receipt is not to be changed, so the problem is how to provide for changeable graphics based on knowledge about a “legacy” application's receipts. An answer to this problem is described in this disclosure.
There are related problems in achieving the goal of inserting graphics into a receipt. One related problem has to do with the art of receipt design, which must be considered when figuring the enhancement total cost, but which is not relevant to the body of this disclosure. What is relevant is that sufficient flexibility in the method is required to realize the above design decisions made about effects that should be achieved, such as, for example, where to insert graphical surrounds of standard receipt text. This flexibility poses a need for maximum flexibility, thus requiring a number of new printer functions rather than one or two canned effects.
Note that the most difficult case of the enhancement problem has been defined with the legacy host application remaining inviolate. If we ease the restriction and modify the application, then some of the invented functions might not be used in particular receipt formats. The approach depends on a trade-off between the cost of each application modification versus the cost to configure the printer. Furthermore, the easiest case is that of an entirely new application that has updated its text printing by using the new color and graphics functions, in which case it may no longer be necessary to use the method functions of the present invention for any of the desired graphics effects. However, the method functions of the present invention can themselves be useful to new applications as well, just as many POS printer additions have been in the past.
If a new application is created for the printer, the entire command set, including color and graphics commands, is available. Hence different POS printer modes can be set, text attributes mapped differently, new logos brought down, and logo roles changed, i.e., which logo will be a header, which will be a watermark, which is used for side margins, and which will be a trailer. Additional application downloaded logos could be printed at the end of a receipt. Enhancements for security can be invoked, for instance, by serializing the margin logo. A new application could even choose to serialize a coupon logo. But even with all these current POS printing features, the mechanized production of the body content of a receipt can be difficult to enhance graphically. Therefore, automatic graphics insertion done by the printer can be useful irrespective of the age of the application.
Another problem that must be addressed is the reluctance of application writers to depend on new functions that are only available on select printers because of the risk of marketability for an application based on only one printer or printer manufacturer line. If an application chooses to use a least common denominator strategy for printer functions, then any new features can be invoked only if they are available as configuration settings. New applications would need to structure their receipts to best take advantage of the configurable features, yet not be dependent on them.